Your Friday Public Health Supplemental (Rant )

So I'm looking at these grad shools, trying to figure out which one to go to, trying to figure out how to pay for that shit, and trying to more earnestly think about what I might want to study.

My nascent interests in public health lie in the intersection of health and food, or, healthy food, I guess. Not "health food" like spelt soy granola tofu scramble or something (YUM!). I am interested in healthy food, that is, fruits and vegetables that are grown in accordance with healthy farming techniques and are healthy themselves... by which I mean they have all their naturally occuring nutrients, genes, etc; and are not chalk-full of all sorts of nastiness. So much of the food we produce and consume today is artificial. It's not even food, as your great-grandma would recognize it.*

[If you are in the dark about how preverse argribusiness is, and how the apple you eat from the chain grocery store (e.g., Safeway) is not the same thing as the apple from your local farmers' market, you are not alone. Most people have no idea of the amount of genetically modified foods we eat. Most people have no idea the amount of chemicals are in the "simple" foods like vegetables and meats we eat, from pesticides to herbicides to antiobiotics. And guess what? All this shit is killing us! It's giving us cancers and diabetes and other diseases. Healthy foods lead to healthy people. Unhealthy foods lead us to a state of nutritional disarray that we currently have here in the United States of Obesity. Your local farmer's apple? That is a healthy apple. Your local safeway's apple? That is an articificial apple. Note, all apples are better than Snickers bars and McDonalds. Both of which I love and I am not advocating that people to stop eating junk food. In fact, I am off on a tangent at this point and am going to have to save the rest of this line of arguing for a different post, someday down the road.]

So, back to my interest in public health and what got me writing this damn post in the first place... You are reading this and saying to yourself, "Self, WTF is he rambling about? Why doesn't he just go to Whole Foods and be done with it."

To which I would reply, "Thank you reader, I am glad you asked about Whole Foods. What a nice segue you make into: Your Friday Public Health Supplemental (Rant)."

I was reading the ole NYTimes.com the other day when I should have been working when this article caught my eye. It discusses how Whole Foods, or as many of us call it, Whole Paycheck, is not living up to its own mission and standards these days in many locations. The article points out that Whole Foods claims to be selling wholesome fresh goodnees while in reality is purchasing much of its food from giant agribusiness companies who do just the bare minimum in order to get "certified organic," and making little or no progress with regard to promoting locally grown produce. (Note, this label "certified organic" is largely a crock of shit, especially if you see it on pre-packaged or produced food that comes in a box on your local grocer's shelves, for more on this, see this blog called Organic Schmorganic.) The article talks about this as a function of WF's growth in the market, and how it is upsetting many.

My gripe in all this is that I am paying a premium for good produce, and I am getting something only marginally better than Safeway? No thanks, I would rather go to the local farmers market. And I am not alone. From the article:

For some current and former customers, complaints about the prices and quality at Whole Foods are a staple of conversation. The store often comes up on a mothers’ blog in an area south of San Francisco, said Caryn Coleman, a stay-at-home mother of two in Mountain View, Calif.

“Produce is no longer consistently good,” Ms. Coleman said. “I can no longer count on it. Because I feel I pay more there I really expect it to be as good as a farmer’s market but sometimes it’s mushy, sometimes it’s old and sometimes it’s good. I think I use organic as proxy for a bunch of other things, like locally grown and fresher, but I’m just beginning to find out I really need to go to farmers’ markets if I want these things. I only go to Whole Foods when I can’t find a product anywhere else.”

And apparently, as the critics grow louder, Whole Foods appears to be listening. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and the guy you are most likely to see discussing this type of stuff on Oprah or writing about it in the NYTs, recently called WF hypocritcal for its practices, which lead to dialogue between he and the CEO of WF on what WF could do to improve.

One big thing they could do is to stock their produce isles with locally grown food. And look at what John Mackey (CEO and co-founder) says in the article:

“Whole Foods needs to do a better job of helping local growers sell directly to our stores without going through our distribution center,” he wrote, and he said he was making it a priority.

Signs have gone up in the company’s markets extolling the virtues of locally grown produce; foragers have been hired to seek out local farmers; the company has offered $10 million a year in low-interest loans to help small farmers produce more and stand-alone stores will open their parking lots to farmers’ markets on Sundays.

That's progress, folks! So now all of us priveleged enough to be able to afford shopping at WF can do so and rest a little better knowing we'll be getting healthier local food, or at least some movement towards that, in the near future. (Of course, if it's an option, you should definitely still go to your local farmers' market.)

Of course, this doesn't get at the real crux of the issue for me, which is access to healthy food, not just that rich people like me aren't getting the healthy food as advertised. Whole Foods and higher end grocery shopping is something for a more priveleged segment of society. What I really want to do in public health is to devise ways (be it policies, programs, campaigns, dunno what it'll take yet and it will probably vary from community to community) to bring healthy food to the masses. But its quittin' time on a Friday afternoon, so we'll save that discussion for a later date...

Have a good weekend!

* See Michale Pollan's amazing article on the age of nutritionalism, from NYT Sun-Mag, and how we should really be thinking about our food. Pollan is something of an inspiration for me I guess, he's talking about the things I am thinking about. Anyways he has this test for whether something is actually food or not: would your great-grandma recognize it as food? If its something highly procesed, chances are no.